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Multimedia » Audio and Video » Audio

Speech Recognition
By Tambi Ashmoz | 27 Feb 2004

Voice-activated OS

Download demo project - 2016.9 KB

Download source - 64.9 KB

Introduction
This is part of a larger project on speech recognition we developed at ORT Braude college. The aim of
the project is to activate programs on your desktop or panel by voice.

Motivation
We planned to make some common tasks that every user does on his/her computer (opening/ closing
programs, editing texts, calculating) possible not only by mouse/ keyboard, but also by voice.

Background
Every speech recognition application consists of:

An engine that translates waves into text

A list of speech commands

Needless to say that as the grammar increases, the probability of misinterpretations grows. We tried
to keep the grammar as small as possible without loosing information. The grammar format is
explained latter.

Requirements
We need SAPI5 (ships with XP)
Microsoft Engine for English (if not found can be downloaded from Microsoft's site)

The easiest way to check if you have these is to enter your control panel-> speech. Here you should

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see the "Text to Speech" tab AND the "Speech recognition" tab. If you don't see the "Speech
Recognition" tab then you should download it from the Microsoft site.

Speech SDK 5.1

Some Technical Stuff

The program is designed to run from its source directory. So, while compiling and running it
from the .NET, you will need to copy to the \bin\debug\ directory the agent file merlin.acs. I've
included it in the demo in case you don't have it in your computer. You can still download from
Microsoft's site any agent you want.
For the same reason, if you changed an XML file you will need to copy it also to the \bin\debug\
directory.

How to Start
The project's interface is shown bellow (Fig 1).

In order to start talking right away, you should do these two steps...

1. The first (and important) thing to do is adjust the microphone by clicking the right mouse button
and choosing the "Mic training wizard."
2. The second (also important) thing to do is training the engine to your voice by choosing "User
training wizard."

IMPORTANT: after these changes, you will need to make the program start listening again by
clicking the right mouse button and choosing "Start listen." The more you train the engine, the better
it will recognize your voice, although you will see an improvement from the first training. After the
program is started, it may be in several "states". In every state, it recognizes a list of specific
commands. The list of the commands that the program can identify is shown below.

A little explanation of the menu...

"Start listen"/"Stop listen"

To enable/disable the mic (it's switched according to what you choose), after disabling the label's
becomes red (accuracy and state) indicating our state.

"Use agent"

Although the agent is used only for giving feedback, it could be useful to know if your command
is heard or not. This is so even though you can disable it if you want or if you don't have an

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agent file (can be downloaded from Microsoft, ACS files) or if it is not working and you still want
to use the recognition (there is no connection between the agent and the recognition). This also
is being taken care of if the program didn't find the agent file or could not be loaded from any
other reason.

"Add favorites"

In the "activate" state you can say the command "favorites programs" and open a form with
your favorites programs and running them by saying the program name. This menu will open a
form showing your favorites programs so you can add/delete or edit them as you want.

"Change character"

This will allow you changing the agent character (can download them from Microsoft site, ACS
files).

"Change accuracy limit"

Every recognition accuracy is displayed in the "Accuracy" label. You can choose this menu and
change the accuracy limit that you want the program to respond to the command that he hears
with. You should do this to avoid responding to any voice or sound that he hears. you can raise
this more every time that you train your computer and increase the recognition.

"Change user profile"

If the program is being used by several users, you can choose to give each user a profile and
train the computer for each one (to add a user profile enter "control panel -> speech." Here you
can only choose existing ones).

"Mic training wizard..."

This is very important (as I explained before) for the recognition. The first thing to do in every
computer (only at the first time) is to activate this menu and setting up your mic or if you
changed your mic to a new one.

"User training wizard..."

For a better recognition (notice that the training is for the selected user profile).

How it Works
The initial state is in the "deactivate" state, which means that the program is in a sleepy state... After
the command "activate" you will wake up the program ("activate" state) and start recognizes other
commands (Fig 2).

For example, use "start" to activate the start menu. Then you can say "programs" to enter the
programs menu. From this point, you can navigate by saying "down"," up", "right"... "OK"
according the commands list. You can also say "commands list" from any point to see a form with
the list of the commands that you can say.

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One of the important states in the program is the "menu" state, meaning that if a program is running
(and focused) you can say "menu" to hook all menu items and start using them. For example, if you
are running Notepad you could open new file by saying "menu"->"File"->"new file". Every time
that you hook menu, you can see how many menus the program hooked so you can start using them
as commands. I had a little problem with some menus like "Word" and "Excel" that I couldn't hook,
but... I'll check it later.

Another nice state is "Numeric state". For example, say the commands "favorites
programs","calculator","enter numeric state", "one","plus","two","equal" and see the result.
Alternatively, you can open a site in "Alphabetic state". For example, say the commands "favorites
programs","internet explorer","enter alphabetic state", "menu","down","down","O K",
"enter alphabetic state","c","o","d","e",...,"dot","c","o","m" and see the result.

Getting Help
One of the main problems with the voice activated systems is what happens if you don't know exactly
which commands the computer expects. No problem! If you are unable to proceed just say "commands
list " and the program will show you what are the available commands from here. States (commands)
available in the program:

deactivate switch program

close speech recognition tab | right
about speech recognition shift tab | left
close | hide enter | ok
activate escape | cancel
deactivate press key
up release | stop
down up
right down
left right
enter | run | ok left
escape | cancel shut down
tab right | tab
menu | alt left | shift tab
All "activate" state + menu items escape | cancel
start enter | ok
deactivate page up
up page down
down yes
right no
left enter numeric state
enter | run | ok exit numeric state
escape back | back space
tab plus
commands list minus
programs mul | multiply
documents div | divide
settings equal
search Numbers from 0 - 9
help enter alphabetic state
run exit alphabetic state
commands list back space
close | hide enter
page up at ("@")
page down underline ("_")
close dash ("-")
favorites | favorites programs dot (".")
close | hide back slash ("/")
A program name from the list Letters from A to Z

Code Explanation

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The first thing to do is to add reference to the file... C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft
Shared\Speech\SAPI.dll so we can use the Speech Library by writing...

using SpeechLib;

When we activate the engine, the initialization step takes place. There are mainly 3 objects involved:

1. An SpSharedRecoContext that starts the recognition process (must be shared so it can apply
to all processes). It implements an ISpeechRecoContext interface. After this object is created,
we add the events we are interested in (in our case AudioLevel and Recognition)
2. A static grammar object that can be loaded from XML file or programmatically implements
ISpeechRecoGrammar the list of static recognizable words is shown in Fig 2 and attached for
downloading dynamic grammar that lets adding rules implement ISpeechGrammarRule;. The
rule has two main parts:
The phrase associated
The name of the rule

Three basic functions that we will need...

initSAPI(): To create grammar interface and activating interested events

SAPIGrammarFromFile(string FileName): To load grammar from file
SAPIGrammarFromArrayList(ArrayList PhraseList): To change grammar
programmatically

private void initSAPI()

{
try
{
objRecoContext = new SpeechLib.SpSharedRecoContext();
objRecoContext.AudioLevel+=
new _ISpeechRecoContextEvents_AudioLevelEventHandler(
RecoContext_VUMeter);
objRecoContext.Recognition+=
new _ISpeechRecoContextEvents_RecognitionEventHandler(
RecoContext_Recognition);
objRecoContext.EventInterests=
SpeechLib.SpeechRecoEvents.SRERecognition |
SpeechLib.SpeechRecoEvents.SREAudioLevel;

//create grammar interface with ID = 0

grammar=objRecoContext.CreateGrammar(0);
}
catch(Exception ex)
{
MessageBox.Show("Exeption \n"+ex.ToString(),"Error - initSAPI");
}
}

After initialization, the engine still will not recognize anything until we load a grammar. There are two
ways to do that: loading a grammar from file...

private void SAPIGrammarFromFile(string FileName)

{
try
{
grammar.CmdLoadFromFile(appPath+FileName,
SpeechLib.SpeechLoadOption.SLODynamic);
grammar.CmdSetRuleIdState(0,SpeechRuleState.SGDSActive);
}
catch
{
MessageBox.Show("Error loading file "+
FileName+"\n","Error - SAPIGrammarFromFile");
}
}

Or we can change the grammar programmatically. The function is getting an ArrayList that every

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item is a structure:

private struct command

{
public string ruleName;
public string phrase;
}

private void SAPIGrammarFromArrayList(ArrayList phraseList)

{
object propertyValue="";
command command1;

int i;
for (i=0;i< phraseList.Count;i++)
{
command1=(command)phraseList[i];

//add new rule with ID = i+100

rule=grammar.Rules.Add(command1.ruleName,
SpeechRuleAttributes.SRATopLevel, i+100);

//add new word to the rule

state=rule.InitialState;
propertyValue="";
state.AddWordTransition(null,command1.phrase," ",
SpeechGrammarWordType.SGLexical, "",
0, ref propertyValue, 1F);

//commit rules

grammar.Rules.Commit();

//make rule active (needed for each rule)

grammar.CmdSetRuleState(command1.ruleName,
SpeechRuleState.SGDSActive);
}
}

All that's left for us is to check the recognized phrase...

public void RecoContext_Recognition(int StreamNumber, object StreamPosition,

SpeechRecognitionType RecognitionType, ISpeechRecoResult e)
{
//get phrase

string phrase=e.PhraseInfo.GetText(0,-1,true);
.
.
.
}

Hooking Menus
When a program is activated, by saying "Menu" its menu is hooked and its commands added to the
dynamic grammar. We used some unmanaged functions which we imported from user32.dll. The
program also hooks the accelerators that are associated with each menu (that have an & sign before
them). The command is simulated with function keybd_event and executed.

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private void hookMenu(IntPtr hMnu)

{
//reset grammar

initSAPI();
SAPIGrammarFromFile("XMLDeactivate.xml");

int mnuCnt=GetMenuItemCount(hMnu);

if (mnuCnt!=0)
{
//add menu to grammar

int i;
command command1;

StringBuilder mnuStr=new StringBuilder(50);

ArrayList phraseList=new ArrayList();

for (i=0;i < mnuCnt;i++)

{
//get sting from menu ... to mnuString

GetMenuString(hMnu,i,mnuStr,50,-1);

//make sure its not a separator

if (mnuStr.ToString()!="")
{
//save in commnd1.ruleName only the underlined letter

command1.ruleName=mnuStr.ToString();
command1.ruleName=command1.ruleName[
command1.ruleName.IndexOf('&')+1].ToString();

//save in command1.phrase the word (without &)

command1.phrase=mnuStr.ToString();
command1.phrase=command1.phrase.Remove(
command1.phrase.IndexOf('&'),1);

phraseList.Add(command1);
}
}

//add the phraseList (menu) to grammar

SAPIGrammarFromArrayList(phraseList);
}
}

Grammar Format
Sample XML grammar... (for the complete grammar tags see Microsoft documentation)

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<!-- 409 = american english -->

<GRAMMAR LANGID="409">
<DEFINE>
<ID NAME="RID_GoodMorning" VAL="0"></ID>
<ID NAME="RID_Activate" VAL="1"></ID>
<ID NAME="RID_Numbers" VAL="3"></ID>
<ID NAME="RID_Close" VAL="3"></ID>
</DEFINE>

<RULE NAME="GoodMorning" ID="RID_GoodMorning"

TOPLEVEL="ACTIVE">
<P>good morning</P>
</RULE>
<RULE NAME="Activate" ID="RID_Activate" TOPLEVEL="ACTIVE">
<O>please</O>
<P>activate</P>
<O>the</O>
<O>computer</O>
</RULE>
<RULE NAME="Numbers" ID="RID_Numbers" TOPLEVEL="ACTIVE">
<L>
<P DISP="1">one</P>
<P DISP="2">two</P>
</L>
</RULE>
<RULE NAME="Close" ID="RID_Close" TOPLEVEL="ACTIVE">
<P WEIGHT=".05">close</P>
</RULE>
</GRAMMAR>

Points of Interest
We used the MSAgent, but in our case it has a passive role (gives feedback that the command is
heard).
There exists an accuracy option. The user can establish a threshold so he can filter unsure
recognitions.
In the future, we plan to make more applications "voice friendly."

License
This article has no explicit license attached to it but may contain usage terms in the article text or the
download files themselves. If in doubt please contact the author via the discussion board below.

A list of licenses authors might use can be found here

About the Author

Tambi Ashmoz

Israel

Member

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